FIRST PHASE OF LUNAR EXPLORATION COMPLETED:

Personnel and Program Changes

The last months of 1969 brought changes in several key offices in NASA
Headquarters and the centers. Thomas O. Paine, who had succeeded James
Webb as NASA administrator less than a year earlier, called George M.
Low to Headquarters to become deputy administrator, the agency's
second-ranking official.* After
guiding Apollo through its most difficult years and at long last
establishing the first post-Apollo project (Skylab), George Mueller
announced his intent to resign as Associate Administrator for Manned
Space Flight at the end of the year. The Air Force reassigned Lt. Gen.
Sam Phillips, longtime manager of the Apollo Program Office under
Mueller, to command its Space and Missile Systems Organization. As
Mueller's replacement Paine named Dale D . Myers, Apollo spacecraft
manager at North American Rockwell for many years; Phillips's place was
filled by Rocco A. Petrone, director of launch operations at Kennedy
Space Center. At Houston, Gilruth appointed Col. James A. McDivitt,
command pilot on Gemini IV and commander of Apollo 9, to head the Apollo
spacecraft project office and Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., MSC's director
of flight operations, to be deputy center director.65 MSC also had a new Director of Science and
Applications, Anthony J. Calio, who succeeded Wilmot Hess after Hess's
resignation in the fall [see Chapter
10].

New managers faced new problems in the year following Apollo 11's
resounding success. Public enthusiasm for lunar missions waned when,
with Apollo 12, they began to seem routine. Funding prospects were also
bleak. Lyndon Johnson's last budget submittal (in January 1969)
requested $3.878 billion for NASA,66
nearly 25 percent lower than the budget for the peak year, fiscal 1965.
When Richard Nixon's first budget was submitted in April, that figure
was reduced to $3.833 billion. Paine put the best face he could on the
situation; the reductions would require "difficult program
adjustments," but in the context of the administration's
determination to reduce government spending, "the nation can
continue a scientifically effective program of manned lunar
exploration" and the capability to produce Saturn V boosters would
not lapse beyond recovery.67 When the
space agency's appropriation bill was signed in November, it provided
only $3.697 billion, and the adjustments became even more difficult.68

Besides being economy minded, the new administration was in no hurry to
establish a position on space. Early in 1969 the new President appointed
a Space Task Group** to study the
space program, calling for a report in six months on alternatives for
the post-Apollo period. Predictably, the group's report, submitted on
September 15, recommended a balanced program of manned and unmanned
space activity. Its most radical suggestion was that NASA should adopt a
new long-range goal, comparable to the Apollo goal that had sustained
space exploration for eight years, to provide the impetus for new
developments. For that goal they suggested manned exploration of the
planets, specifically a manned landing on Mars by the end of the 20th
century. Three options were proposed: an all-out effort, including a
50-man earth-orbiting space station and a lunar base, culminating with
the Mars landing in the mid-1980s; a less ambitious program providing
for evaluation of an unmanned Mars landing before setting a date for the
manned mission; and a minimum program that would develop a space station
and a shuttle vehicle but would defer the Mars landing to some
unspecified time before the end of the century. Costs were estimated at
between $8 billion and $10 billion per year by 1980 for the most
ambitious option and from $4 billion to $5.7 billion annually by 1976
for the least.69

Nixon's reaction to the Space Task Group report was not immediately
forthcoming. His press secretary declined to predict when the President
would make a decision, but said that competing domestic programs and the
constraints imposed by inflation would certainly have to be considered
in funding any new space ventures.70

Public reaction to the proposal of a manned flight to Mars was generally
negative. The Washington Post suggested that such a trip
should be weighed carefully in terms of its potential scientific value:
"It is knowledge we seek, not spectaculars. . . . "71 A point of view shared by many scientists was
expressed at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) in December by Gordon J. F. MacDonald, who
characterized it as "the utmost folly." Retiring AAAS
president Waiter Orr Roberts said that the United States should not set
a goal of sending men to Mars "now or ever."72 Even congressional supporters of manned space
flight found the proposal unacceptable. The chairman of the House
Science and Astronautics Committee told the House that he was unwilling
to commit the nation to any specific timetable for sending men to Mars,
and the chairman of the Manned Space Flight subcommittee likewise shied
away from an endorsement.73

Perhaps the thumbs-down reaction to a Mars flight was to be expected,
given the projected cost of such a program, which the Space Task Group
estimated at $54:1 billion to $78.2 billion during the 1970-1980 decade.
Somewhat surprising was that even Apollo, hitherto all but inviolable,
was not to escape the effects of NASA's straitening circumstances. On
January 4, 1970, following dedication of the Lunar Science Institute at
Houston, deputy administrator George Low announced that Apollo 20 had
been canceled and the schedule for the seven remaining flights would be
stretched out into 1974. Four would be flown in 1970-1971 at intervals
depending on the choice of sites. Lunar exploration would then be
interrupted while the three-mission Apollo Applications Program (a
rudimentary space station in earth orbit, soon to be renamed
"Skylab") was conducted. The last three missions to the moon
would be flown in 1973 and 1974. Low denied reports that NASA planned to
cancel four Apollo flights, saying that such action would "do away
with most of our scientific return and waste the investment we have
made." Lunar scientists were reported to have been pleased by Low's
announcement;74 they had evidently
feared that even more missions would be deleted.

Ten days later, after preliminary discussions on the fiscal 1971 budget,
administrator Thomas O. Paine revealed more changes in space
exploration. Saturn V launch vehicle production was to be suspended
indefinitely after the fifteenth booster was completed, leaving NASA
with no means of putting really large payloads into earth orbit or
continuing lunar exploration. The last Saturn V was reassigned from
Apollo 20 to Skylab. Unmanned explorations of Mercury and Mars were
reduced or deferred. Some 50,000 of the estimated 190,000 employees of
NASA and its contractors would have to be laid off, and many university
scientists would find their projects without funds. Though the new plans
imposed real austerity, Paine noted that they did provide for a start on
the next project, development of a reusable spacecraft to shuttle crews
and payloads between earth and a space station in earth orbit.75

Apollo still had supporters in Congress, however, and they tried their
best to add $130.5 million to the administration's budget for lunar
exploration in fiscal 1971. But the Senate would not go along, and after
a vigorous debate, the conference committee reported an authorization
bill containing an increase of only $38 million for Apollo.76 After the first two lunar landings, Congress
and the nation were ready to get on to other things - but nothing so
expensive as a flight to Mars. A congressional historian who served on
the House space committee described the dawn of the 1970s as "the
worst of times for the space program," and then summarized the
budget debates:
By hindsight, it seems unlikely that even the
strongest and most adept mobilization of the supporters of more manned
flights to the Moon could have successfully overcome the adverse feeling
in the country in the early 1970's. Congress and the Nation could be
persuaded to support Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and a modest level of
activity by NASA in many other areas. But . . . Von Braun's dream of a
manned flight to Mars was not in the cards for the 20th century, at
least.77

* At the time Low, who took over as
manager of MSC's Apollo spacecraft project office after the AS-204 fire
in April 1967, was serving as special assistant to MSC Director Robert
R. Gilruth.

** Chaired by Vice-President Spiro
T. Agnew, the group included Robert C. Seamans, Secretary of the Air
Force and former deputy administrator of NASA; Thomas O. Paine, NASA
Administrator; and Lee A. Dubridge, Science Adviser to the President.
Observers were U. Alexis Johnson, Undersecretary of State for Political
Affairs; Glenn T. Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; and
Robert P. Mayo, director of the Bureau of the Budget.